News:

"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

Keep showing your TRUE right wing attempts to take the heat off of Trump COLORS, Az.

That's why I don't post much here anymore. There is so much disingenuous double talking right wing propaganda BULLSHIT being spewed here that it is nauseating.

What you SHOULD BE posting about, if you had an OUNCE of objectivity, is THIS:

Quote

Trump has gone to great lengths to protect Flynn, likely because the latter has information that would incriminate the president. It took Trump 18 days to fire Flynn after learning of his lies to Pence. Trump leaned heavily on Comey to look the other way in the Flynn investigation and fired Comey when he refused to let Flynn go.

It was the firing of Comey that led to the appointment of special counsel Mueller.

First they tell you what to think the wars are for. They’re for protection from evil enemies, for spreading democracy and human rights.

Then you discover that wasn’t so. The evil enemies were actually human beings and no threat. The wars on terrorism have created many more enemies and spread terrorism far and wide. They’ve endangered rather than protected. They’ve damaged democracy at home and abroad. They’ve violated human rights and normalized their violation.

Then they tell you to keep the wars going for the sake of the poor fools sent into them and coming out of them with PTSD, brain injury, moral injury, and suicidal tendencies. If you’re not for harming more troops you’re “against” the troops.

Then you discover that this is all a twisted lie, that these one-sided slaughters that so devastate even the aggressors have no benefits, that people could have better and better-paying and more satisfying and less environmentally destructive jobs in peaceful industries for less financial, moral, and societal expense. It turns out the wars are for weapons profits and resource control and political domination and sadism.

TRNN Replay: On the occasion of the passing of author and friend of the Real News Network Edward S. Herman, we replay our interview from the 25th anniversary of 'Manufacturing Consent', that he co-authored with Noam Chomsky

July 1, 2012

Ed Herman, Co-Author of "Manufacturing Consent" Pt 1

Ed Herman, who wrote the famous book with Noam Chomsky, looks back at his life and what formed his thinking about the world

Agelbert NOTE: Learn WHY the NAME of Trump was continually paraded before the media (and other places ALL OVER THE INTERNET ) before the election.

Also learn why, AFTER the election, that continues to be the case. Even when the news is negative, the old advertising saying about "all news is good news" (for product sales) applies to mindfork propaganda on behalf of the Trump demagogue too.

The clever Orwellian BASTARDS doing this have a method to their madness. It consists of repeatedly activating the most impressionable part of our cognitive hardware so we will be imprinted with an unconscious bias in favor of the politician making the greatest noise.

People that possess critical thinking skills do not fall for this. Unfortunately, most Americans lack those skills. That is why they get suckered election after election.

The ones that don't get suckered are carefully and methodically (SEE: mens rea disguised voter suppression ) being denied the vote by being forced to go through bullshit red tape hoops.

Trump is not your father. Trump is a THIEF who is, not just robbing your home , but helping to burn it down!

A famous author has theorized conservatives and progressives into two camps, one based on a strict, authoritarian view of the world and the next based on a nurturing view, where do these camps lead us?

Thom Hartmann Nov. 14, 2017 2:30 pm

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

Where have I heard this story before?? Let's hear the screams to resign please. Hello, Hello, let's hear them now.

Must be going deaf.

Woman accuses Al Franken of kissing, groping her without consent

A TV host and sports broadcaster on Thursday accused Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) of kissing and groping her without her consent in 2006.

The incident happened in December 2006, she said, when she and Franken, then a comedian, were on a USO Tour to "entertain our troops."

Keep defending your hero while he keeps robbing you blind, GO.

I guess it is just too hard for you to admit that you made a tragic and unprincipled mistake by voting for the most egregious example of mysogeny, sexual harrassment, bigotry, racism and profit over planet greed that has ever cursed this God Forsaken nation.

You have had fully one year to recognize your mistake. Crooks and ciars named by Trump to all key government positions during the last year has revealed the true nature of Trump and his wrecking crew to anyone with a shred of objectivity.

Only someone who refuses to alter his position, even when new objective, irrefutable evidence requires it, can remain loyal to someone like Trump. Not changing one's position when new information warrants it is the textbook definition of a bigot. The Holy Scriptures, however, do not label such a person as a bigot; the Bible has another label for them:

Proverbs 13 King James Version (KJV) 19 The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul: but it is abomination to fools to depart from evil. 20 He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

This is serious. Sexual harassment is pervasive and happens at the very top of the institutions that run this country. We owe it to all women to hold men, especially those with immense power, accountable for their actions. Yes, this includes the president too.

In the video, 16 Women and Donald Trump, we put together the stories of women who have reported being sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by Donald Trump. Seeing these women’s stories, one after another, is incredibly powerful – it's time to listen and act accordingly. As a society, we need to do a better job of holding men liable for harassment and abusive behavior. And we have a right to hear these women's their stories even as the mainstream news outlets dismiss them and the White House deflects responsibility for them. It's time to disrupt the powers that silence the voices of women in all of our institutions. Please share this video to remind the nation that Hollywood isn't the only place abuse happens and that our current president isn’t immune to being held accountable.

Agelbert NOTE: Expect Trumpers like G.O. (and others here who cleverly do not admit to having voted Republican, EVEN THOUGH THEY DID!) to wail and moan about Franklen and every other distraction they can come up with in order to provide COVER for the Criminal in Chief and his racist, mysogenist, profit over planet wrecking crew.

Trump supporters worship GREED. They do not care about ANYTHING evil or illegal that Trump and his wrecking crew do, or have done, as long as Trump feeds their GREED.

Quote

"Capitalist ideology claims that the world is perfectly ordered and everybody is in their place (i..e. everybody gets what they deserve). This self legitmating aspect of Capitalism is Socially Catastrophic. This is the Victorian view of the world." Rob Urie - Author " Zen Economics"

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

AZ, Surly is a man of integrity and truth. I consider him a loyal member of the Cat Herders Association that I belong to. Cat Herders are always trying to get the bullshitters among us to try truth instead of negative noises designed to distract people from the important issues of our time. It is a a very bad idea to challenge him and a very good advice to listen to what he says.

Recent Photo of Surly:

Surly RULES!

« Last Edit: November 22, 2017, 02:08:54 pm by AGelbert »

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

I first encountered McLuhan as an undergraduate in communication back during the last ice age. Interesting to be reminded how he anticipated the implications of then-technological changes, when at the time it read, at least to be, as improbable nonsense.

This writer is addressing themes that occur to me, but which are too elusive for me to be competent to write about. One of the attributes of getting older being the you see your own ignorance in sharp relief.

In the above, otherwise well written, article, there is a problem of perception that I first ran into in college when I was taking Social Sciences at Miami Dade Junior College (1965) shortly after I left West Point.

We were assigned to read a book (The Lonely Crowd) that you may have read, although I am certain the right wing 'greed is good' fanatics that frequent this site have never heard of it, no matter how much college or education they claim to have.

Quote

The Lonely Crowd is a 1950 sociological analysis by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. It is considered, along with White Collar: The American Middle Classes, written by Riesman's friend and colleague, C. Wright Mills, a landmark study of American character.[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Crowd

I read it. I did NOT just read the Cliff Notes. Beyond the snippet I just gave you from wikipedia, I did not review the book I read so many years ago to impress anybody here. I am responding to the article because that instantly retrieved "The Lonely Crowd" out of long term storage in my memory banks.

Here's the deal, Surly. A person is either driven by outside influences (peer pressure) or he is not. Yes, we all have a mixture of influences, both from without, and from within, that govern our behavior. But the ASSUMPTION that we are invariably governed by peer pressure is only valid if peer pressure ALWAYS overrides personal principles. Now, those Social Darwinst fascists at the helm of the media corporations that want to control our every whim probably believe that.

I do not. And you should not. A shi t sandwich disguised as a chocolate chip cookie is still a shi t sandwich, even if 40,000 bought and paid for bullshit artists are telling you otherwise.

What this boils down to is perception. The media fascists are attempting, as our gooberment and happy talk propaganda based social institutions have ALWAYS been trying to do (SEE: The Lonely Crowd), the "join the in crowd" con. They want us to feel "left out" if we do not do what "everybody else is doing".

But you and I know that everybody else is NOT "doing that". The polling of the American public makes it CRYSTAL CLEAR that they are on the right side of almost every issue of importance and value to an egalitarian socialist type government structure.

AND, most people, except for the allegedly big brained right wingers (like some who post here, who claim most people in the USA are ignorant rubes that swallow any bullshit, no matter how much it harms their best interests - how convenient for the right wing profit over people and planet Capitalist bastards.), DO REALIZE they are being handed a daily SHI T sandwich by the media and the gooberment.

Yeah, divide and conquer is what is going on. Yeah, they want to tear us apart. Yeah, they want to use the PERCEPTION (totally FALSE, but very convincing through bought and paid for repetition) that people who are guided by principle and not by the mob are outliers (i.e. anti-American/anti-Capitalist/Communists, etc. ad nauseum).

True, we all want to belong. But anyone who is willing to sacrifice their principles in order to "belong" is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The article gives way to much weight to our need for peer group acceptance and ZERO weight to every average human's daily objective analysis of what is genuinely good for an individual and the society that he lives in (i.e. PRINCIPLED behavior).

I am not a Maslow robot. If the author believes that we humans, who certainly do possess base instincts that can, under certain conditions, be manipulated to our detriment and some bastard's profit (i.e. Capitalism), CANNOT function in any other way (i.e. Social Darwinsm is IT), then I must protest.

Social Darwinsim is NOT "IT". Maslow is NOT "IT".

We behave on principle or we perish. That is not hard to understand unless a person deliberately refuses to value principles because they deliberately refuse to give any value to morality based behavior. The book I read in college, The Lonely Crowd, TOTALLY missed the issue of principle. I said so then, even though I was an atheist at the time! LOL!

Yeah, I know Surly; I'm an outlier.

Logged

Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

How Did We Wind Up in a Post-Truth World? And What Can Be Done About It?

From coal’s astroturfing online to an artificial intelligence’s both-sides equivocation, when we talked about denial in the age of AI last week, things didn’t look promising. Fortunately, the December issue of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition is here! It’s a special edition, focused on a lengthy article and featuring nine responses, all offering some help navigating misinformation in the post-truth age, with an eye towards technology.

Given the importance of the matter and depth of the research, and that all but the initial paper are behind a paywall, this will be the first in a rare three-part roundup. We felt it fitting to end this post-truth year with a rumination on our post-truth past.

For those who want a crash course in the tenets Lewandowsky, Ecker and Cook’s piece is based on, see The Debunking Handbook. But the three authors move past the summary to a much more interesting analysis: they argue that American society must look at the socio-political context of fake news to fully understand its impacts and solutions, expanding the current focus from online interactions to the full IRL experience.

“The post-truth problem is not a blemish on the mirror,” they write. Instead, “the problem is that the mirror is a window into an alternative reality.” In this reality, elites and their evidence, like the multiple independent lines of research proving climate change is caused by human activities, are cast aside in favor of socially shared alt-news. The election of Donald Trump shows just how these misinformation ecosystems have moved from the fringe corners of the internet into the mainstream.

But the creation of these new realities is not a bipartisan problem: rather, it’s a curiously conservative phenomenon. Whether it’s a NASA-run child slave colony on Mars or the decades-old conspiracy around the UN’s plans for a global government or climate change being a Chinese hoax, the authors advise on the need to consider misinformation through “the lens of political drivers that have created an alternative epistemology that does not conform to conventional standards of evidentiary support.”

This is a fancy way of saying that sometimes conservative leaders just make bullshit up and people believe them. While this reckoning may seem new, the authors demonstrate that it’s been a long time coming (Karl Rove’s admission that the Bush administration actors “create[d] our own reality” is a particularly poignant example). The authors’ reference that Republicans “have moved towards the right in a manner unprecedented since the 1880s” follows with the fact that the right appears to be more susceptible to the pseudo-profound bullshit philosophical nonsensewe’ve talked about before.

One important effect of creating alternate realities on social media, the authors explain, is the invention of intense, imaginary conflict. Did scientists really discuss manipulating data in hacked emails? Of course not, but arguing about it makes for good TV! Fanning the hot flames of these conflicts, in turn, pushes politicians towards extremism. While nominees have traditionally hewed to the center for the largest possible share of votes, modern politicians now focus on their echo chamber to rile up the base. In this new post-truth world, “lying is not only accepted, it is rewarded,” Lewandowsky, Ecker and Cook write. “Falsifying reality is no longer about changing people's beliefs, it is about asserting power.”

These concepts make it crystal clear that climate denial is not an attempt to build a base of knowledge contrary to the consensus. Rather, the authors write, climate denial is “a political operation aimed at generating uncertainty in the public's mind in order to preserve the status quo and to delay climate-change mitigation.”

So how do we get people (conservatives) to care about truth and reality again? Technocognition might just have some answers.

But, uh… what is that? Mind melds with a Mac? Uploading our consciousness into the Matrix? Studying climate change while listening to the latest techno jams? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

I'm wondering if people really are smart enough to figure it out or not. Can you give a giant gift to corporate America and call it a "tax cut" for everyone, and fool most of the people? Probably. Stupidity abounds.

Trump is repeating the words "tax cut" over and over like he thinks if he says it enough times, everyone will have no choice but to believe him. Mass hypnosis, anyone?

When I studied sociology at the GCSE level (equivalent to SATS) there was a message in the classroom that read: if you repeat a lie often enough people will take as the truth. Trump is following the philosophy behind this message. To be more precise the idea comes from Joseph Goebbels the head of the propaganda of the Nazi party the exact quote as read in my classroom was:"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself."

The resemblance was not lost on me. I've read that line, of course. Did you know that Goebbels was an avid student of Edward Bernays and Gustav Le Bon?

Any trained hypnotist will tell you that the trick is to talk to people's subconscious mind. That part of our psyche hears everything and can't distinguish what's real from what's merely programmed. Repeat it enough and it sticks. This is the secret of the wonderful success of TV advertising. This is also why I personally gave up television.

I debated that issue in college way back in the 1960's. The power to convince others of a blatant untruth through repetition is limited by the perceived credibility/authority of the person or institution pushing the propaganda. Goebbels knew that, Hitler knew that and I'm certain you and Monsta know it.

We can never leave that out of the discussion. Without credibility, a person can repeat ad infinitum that the portion of the people's chocolate ration (See: Orwell 1984) is being RAISED from 20 grams a week to 15 grams a week, and they will be laughed to scorn while being labelled delusional whackos or simply bold faced liars.

It is sine qua non to the "Skillful" application of Propaganda for the Propagandist(s) to be perceived as a FRIEND of we-the-people.

I am certain that the hitherto successful fiction of GOP (and a large part of Democratic Party corporate toadies - i.e. "We have your best interests at heart") is TOAST.

I know you don't agree, but I am convinced the overwhelming majority of we-the-people see these bold faced liars for what they are (see below graphic).

Therefore, I do not think most people will continue to swallow the Fascist Bullshit, no matter how many times it is repeated.

December 20, 2017

Hold these senators accountable for voting for the Tax Cut (for the rich and the shaft for the middle class and poor) Bill:Hold these senators accountable for voting for the Tax Cut Bill:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

John Barrasso (R-WY)

John Boozman (R-AR)

Richard M. Burr (R-NC)

Thad Cochran (R-MS)

Bob Corker (R-TN)

John Cornyn (R-TX)

Steve Daines (R-MT)

Michael B. Enzi (R-WY)

Jeff Flake (R-AZ)

Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

Charles E. Grassley (R-IA)

Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT)

James M. Inhofe (R-OK)

Johnny Isakson (R-GA)

Ron Johnson (R-WI)

James Lankford (R-OK)

John McCain (R-AZ)

Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Rand Paul (R-KY)

David Perdue (R-GA)

Rob Portman (R-OH)

Pat Roberts (R-KS)

Michael Rounds (R-SD)

Tim Scott (R-SC)

Richard C. Shelby (R-AL)

Luther Strange (R-AL)

John Thune (R-SD)

Thom Tillis (R-NC)

Patrick J. Toomey (R-PA)

Roger Wicker (R-MS)

Todd Young (R-IN)

Roy Blunt (R-MO)

Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV)

Bill Cassidy (R-LA)

Tom Cotton (R-AR)

Michael D. Crapo (R-ID)

Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Joni Ernst (R-IA)

Cory Gardner (R-CO)

Dean Heller (R-NV)

John Hoeven (R-ND)

Mike Lee (R-UT)

Jerry Moran (R-KS)

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)

Jim Risch (R-ID)

Marco Rubio (R-FL)

Ben Sasse (R-NE)

Dan Sullivan (R-AK)

Susan Collins (R-ME)

Deb Fischer (R-NE)

John Kennedy (R-LA)

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

How Did We Wind Up in a Post-Truth World? And What Can Be Done About It?

From coal’s astroturfing online to an artificial intelligence’s both-sides equivocation, when we talked about denial in the age of AI last week, things didn’t look promising. Fortunately, the December issue of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition is here! It’s a special edition, focused on a lengthy article and featuring nine responses, all offering some help navigating misinformation in the post-truth age, with an eye towards technology.

Given the importance of the matter and depth of the research, and that all but the initial paper are behind a paywall, this will be the first in a rare three-part roundup. We felt it fitting to end this post-truth year with a rumination on our post-truth past.

For those who want a crash course in the tenets Lewandowsky, Ecker and Cook’s piece is based on, see The Debunking Handbook. But the three authors move past the summary to a much more interesting analysis: they argue that American society must look at the socio-political context of fake news to fully understand its impacts and solutions, expanding the current focus from online interactions to the full IRL experience.

“The post-truth problem is not a blemish on the mirror,” they write. Instead, “the problem is that the mirror is a window into an alternative reality.” In this reality, elites and their evidence, like the multiple independent lines of research proving climate change is caused by human activities, are cast aside in favor of socially shared alt-news. The election of Donald Trump shows just how these misinformation ecosystems have moved from the fringe corners of the internet into the mainstream.

But the creation of these new realities is not a bipartisan problem: rather, it’s a curiously conservative phenomenon. Whether it’s a NASA-run child slave colony on Mars or the decades-old conspiracy around the UN’s plans for a global government or climate change being a Chinese hoax, the authors advise on the need to consider misinformation through “the lens of political drivers that have created an alternative epistemology that does not conform to conventional standards of evidentiary support.”

This is a fancy way of saying that sometimes conservative leaders just make bullshit up and people believe them. While this reckoning may seem new, the authors demonstrate that it’s been a long time coming (Karl Rove’s admission that the Bush administration actors “create[d] our own reality” is a particularly poignant example). The authors’ reference that Republicans “have moved towards the right in a manner unprecedented since the 1880s” follows with the fact that the right appears to be more susceptible to the pseudo-profound bullshit philosophical nonsensewe’ve talked about before.

One important effect of creating alternate realities on social media, the authors explain, is the invention of intense, imaginary conflict. Did scientists really discuss manipulating data in hacked emails? Of course not, but arguing about it makes for good TV! Fanning the hot flames of these conflicts, in turn, pushes politicians towards extremism. While nominees have traditionally hewed to the center for the largest possible share of votes, modern politicians now focus on their echo chamber to rile up the base. In this new post-truth world, “lying is not only accepted, it is rewarded,” Lewandowsky, Ecker and Cook write. “Falsifying reality is no longer about changing people's beliefs, it is about asserting power.”

These concepts make it crystal clear that climate denial is not an attempt to build a base of knowledge contrary to the consensus. Rather, the authors write, climate denial is “a political operation aimed at generating uncertainty in the public's mind in order to preserve the status quo and to delay climate-change mitigation.”

So how do we get people (conservatives) to care about truth and reality again? Technocognition might just have some answers.

But, uh… what is that? Mind melds with a Mac? Uploading our consciousness into the Matrix? Studying climate change while listening to the latest techno jams? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

Yesterday we charted the course that led us to Post-Truth Land. How might we find our way out? Hard to say, but fortunately, the second portion of Lewandowsky, Ecker and Cook’s piece offers some suggestions. They also coined fun new phrase to embody the changes that need to be made: technocognition.

As the authors explain, technocognition is the idea that we should use what we know about psychology to design technology in a way that minimizes the impact of misinformation. By improving how people communicate, they hope, we can improve the quality of the information shared.

Fundamentally, the authors argue for the need to educate the public about trolls and fake news, and improve journalism to better fight the misinformation. In addition to common sense steps like disclosing pundit and writer’s conflicts of interests and encouraging more participation to collectively reshape the norm into one where facts matter, media outlets should hire myth-busting fake news reporters, and consider forming a common “Disinformation Charter” of what’s acceptable behavior and standard of accuracy.

But the authors recognize that we can’t expect everyone to start playing by the rules which is why there is a need for independent watchdogs to act as the fake news referees, calling out errors and identifying when stories go past the truth. The climate world, which had already formed important defenses against deniers even before one was elected president, have a couple key actors already in this space, including Climate Feedback. More broadly there’s the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organisation, which recently forced a correction of a Daily Mail climate conspiracy.

Then there’s the techno-side of the equation. These are the Silicon Valley fixes, like algorithms that can automatically fact check content to prevent fake news from showing up in searches or feeds, or mechanisms to flag fake news on social media.

Website moderators, the authors argue, need to do a better job containing trolls in the first place. From screening certain phrases that are primarily used as fake news framing to eliminating comment sections all together, there are lots of potential ways of curating the comment section so it’s not such a cesspool of hate and lies. But more important than the comments is the content, which is why the authors suggest that an app for reporters would be useful for quick and easy determinations of what’s real and what’s an alternative fact- the Skeptical Science app for example.

And finally, while this is hardly an ask coming solely from the authors, tech companies should find ways to show people content from beyond their bubble. For example, while Facebook and Twitter primarily show users content based on their subscriptions, reddit’s /all and /popular pages show a mix of what everyone’s looking at, regardless of personal preference. This gives users a sense of the world outside their immediate awareness, forcing at least a subconscious recognition of the wider world they may not want to recognize.

Reading through this list of recommendations, and one gets the idea that with some simple tweaks from Silicon Valley, our post-truth problems could be solved. But is it enough?

For now, we hope that technocognition gets some techno-recognition. As unlikely as it may be, we find ourselves wishing for a way to make this anti-fake-news scholarship achieve a fraction of the viral shares that fake news regularly does.

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Leges Sine Moribus VanaeFaith, if it has not works, is dead, being alone.

California is an experiment to see what people will do. So is Chicago. Expect tomorrow and the coming weeks to be very violent and the liberals to be out of control – eaten up by a few groups which will be more ferocious than you know.

Expect distractions and false flags and the media to ignore important events.It’s happening and it’s happening fast.

Bahahaha... all those violent liberals. Remember all the Nazis who died in Charlottesville?Anything to distract from the Trumprussia treason bunnies.

Agelbert NOTE: azozeo (AZ for short) is a closet Trumper specializing in false, distracting, meaningless and sensationalist clickbait to get people's attention off of the in-your-face fascist destruction of the USA by Trump and his wrecking crew . Often, ridicule works better on these malicious propagandists than censure (see below).

Here's a nice bit of clickbait for ya, AZ. I just thought of it but I'm sure you can get a pack of views before people figure it out: